"Ecstatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terms. A round of the supper places, proposed by the Englishman, was assented to by Mr. Coulson with enthusiasm. About three o'clock in the morning Mr. Coulson had the appearance of a man for whom the troubles of this world are over, and who was realizing the ecstatic bliss of a temporary Nirvana. Mr. Gaynsforth, on the other hand, although half an hour ago he had been boisterous and unsteady, seemed suddenly to have become once more the quiet, discreet-looking young Englishman who had first bowed to Mr. Coulson in the bar of the Grand Hotel and accepted ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... alone on the second seat of George Browning's coach, driving through the Park. "If we were like those people"—he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... peacefully by, and the evening meal, mercifully set in the middle, was reached, to the children's vast content. They made wry, humorous mouths, each jest endeared by annual repetition, over the horseradish that typified the bitterness of the Egyptian bondage, and ecstatic grimaces over the soft, sweet mixture of almonds, raisins, apples, and cinnamon, vaguely suggestive of the bondsmen's mortar; they relished the eggs sliced into salt water, and then—the symbols all duly swallowed—settled down with more prosaic satisfaction to the merely edible ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... displays in the CIRCUS ring. Then the famous equestrienne—or rideress, as WEBSTER would probably call her—careers around the circle on her thoroughbred Alaskian steed: she is evidently a great favorite, and the small boy behind me exclaims, with an ecstatic kick at the back of my neck: "Isn't ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... shone clear behind me; the dark was lightness and the crooked straight. All the future lay clear ahead it presented no difficulties yet; a mad, ecstatic confidence was mine for the wildest, ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a "perfect soul" in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of "perfection," a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called "holiness"—a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... only the highly wrought letters on music or the great majority of his poems. From one standpoint he seems a burning flame. As a matter of fact, however, his enthusiasm for anything that was fine and the ecstatic rapture into which he passed under the spell of great music or nature or poetry, were balanced by humor that was playful and delicate and at times irresistible. His pranks as a college boy and as a soldier have already been ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... cried ecstatic Belle. "Honest confession is good for the soul. I'll admit that most men and women are made of dust—street dust at that—but Roger Atwood is pure gold. He has the quickest brain and steadiest hand of any fellow in the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... there is an even more serious objection to Blake's mysticism—and indeed to all mysticism: its lack of humanity. The mystic's creed—even when arrayed in the wondrous and ecstatic beauty of Blake's verse—comes upon the ordinary man, in the rigidity of its uncompromising elevation, with a shock which is terrible, and almost cruel. The sacrifices which it demands are too vast, in spite of the divinity of what it has to offer. What shall it profit a man, one is tempted ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... of which walked, some flew, and others fluttered, according to their varying moods, with an immense deal of fuss and cackling, which was appropriately capped by the senior cock mounting on one of the huts and taking possession of the land with an ecstatic crow. ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the sorrow inherent in all existence. Happiness, whether expected in one's own life, in an ecstatic life beyond the grave, or in the far future of humanity, is an illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake—a stupendous blunder ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... not Soul, produces material ec- 7:18 stasy and emotion. If spiritual sense always guided men, there would grow out of ecstatic mo- ments a higher experience and a better life 7:21 with more devout self-abnegation and purity. A self- satisfied ventilation of fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by man. The "di- ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... but is more serene, exalted, and enduring. Triumph is such joy as results from victory, success, achievement. Blessedness is at once the state and the sense of being divinely blessed; as, the blessedness of the righteous. Bliss is ecstatic, perfected happiness; as, the bliss of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... not lie chiefly in processes of bookish-culture, nor in contemplations of the beauty and majesty of existence. It lies chiefly in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the peace, with those with whom one is 'thrown.' Is it in sitting ecstatic over Shelley, Shakespeare, or Herbert Spencer, solitary in my room of a night, that I am 'improving myself' and learning to live? Or is it in watching over all my daily human contacts? Do not seek to escape the comparison by insinuating that I despise study, or by pointing ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... the Berlin public first saw its Barberina dance, and wrote ecstatic Latin Epigrams about that miracle of nature and art; [Rodenbeck, pp. 111, 190.]—miracle, alas, not entirely omissible by us. Here is her Story, as the Books give it; slightly mythical, I judge, in some of its non-essential parts; but good enough ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... destined not to see her appear in that expectant frame. Twenty years before—though he had forgotten it—in a dazzling room where there was a Christmas tree, he had uttered a shriek of ecstatic timidity just as a jingling Santa Claus began to emerge from behind the tree, and he had run out of the room and out of the house. He did exactly the same thing now, though this time the ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... which shows what a wicked creature I must be not to like him. You shall come to us, Diana, and be my sister; and we will play and sing our pet duets together, and be as happy as two birds in a cage, or a good deal happier—for I never could quite understand the ecstatic delight of perpetual hempseed and an occasional peck at a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... softness,—yet so brilliantly that the very lights of heaven seem dimmed in comparison. The moon, in Holbein's deliberate audacity, seems but a disc as she bows her face, too, in worship. Shining by some compulsion of purest Nature, the divine radiance glows on the ecstatic Mother; and away above and beyond her—"How far that little candle shines," and shines, and shines again amid the shadows! It illumines the beautiful face of the Virgin, touches the reverent awe of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... broke forth into prayer. Her voice rose high and sweet. 'T was as if she was conversing with the angels around the throne of God. I trembled lest, in its ecstatic rapture, her soul should burst its fleshly bonds and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... love. Well, at twenty-nine I saw Valentine; for two years I have loved her, for two years I have seen written in her heart, as in a book, all the virtues of a daughter and wife. Count, to possess Valentine would have been a happiness too infinite, too ecstatic, too complete, too divine for this world, since it has been denied me; but without Valentine ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Buddhism proclaims that self-destruction is a deadly sin. Now this idea of winning union through death is incalculably older than the faith of Shaka; but it has somehow borrowed in modern time from Buddhism a particular ecstatic colouring, a mystical glow. Hasu no hana no ue ni oite matan. On the lotus-blossoms of paradise they shall rest together. Buddhism teaches of transmigrations countless, prolonged through millions of millions of years, before the soul can acquire the Infinite ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the conversations pursued, not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me—from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850—down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to describe that waltz. It was one of the ecstatic moments which Young Joy sometimes tosses from her garlanded arms. It was one of the sudden, vivid, unforgettable delights which makes youth a fever and a desire. For Billy it was the wildest stab the sex had ever dealt him. ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... a soldier good-naturedly threw it to her and it fell in the water about three feet from the shore. She hurled herself upon it waist deep in the water and seized it, then waved her arms and leaped about in a dance of ecstatic triumph that would have made ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... fervent expressions of gratitude, with which Babette's name was frequently mingled, and when he heard them speak so, the superintendent put on an ecstatic air; looking up to heaven with clasped hands, he said, slowly shaking his head: "Ah! Babette is a very ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... all the morning, and all the parish was there, round about the church, to see. There was no record of a lord ever having been married in Clavering church before; and now this lord was going to marry my lady's sister. It was all one as though she were a Clavering herself. But there was no ecstatic joy in the parish. There were to be no bonfires, and no eating and drinking at Sir Hugh's expense—no comforts provided for any of the poor by Lady Clavering on that special occasion. Indeed, there was never much of such kindnesses ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... itself was of a reddish color, inclining to violet, about the hue therefore, of capillary blood, coagulating in the usual way, and the white and red corpuscles being normal in character and relative proportion. The flow ceased on Saturdays. During the flow of the blood the patient was in a rapt, ecstatic condition. The facial expression was one of absorption and far-off contemplation, changing often to melancholy, terror, to an attitude of prayer or contrition. The patient herself stated that at the beginning of the ecstasy she imagined herself surrounded by a brilliant light; figures ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Alice; and she turned back; but then returned and threw a handkerchief over the dead man's face, which while they spoke had assumed that quiet, ecstatic expression of joy which often is observed to overspread the faces of those who die of gunshot wounds, however fierce the passion in which the spirits took their flight. With this strange, grand, awful ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... keyhole. But I realized in that moment of surprise that this office was an essential feature of the War; without it, the War might become Peace. It provoked the emotions which assembled civilians in ecstatic support of the sacrifices, just as the staff of a corps headquarters, at some comfortable leagues behind the trenches, maintains its fighting men in the place where gas and shells tend to engender ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... was about to say "Thou satisfiest me," I saw myself arrived on the next round,[1] so that my eager eyes made me silent. There it seemed to me I was of a sudden rapt in an ecstatic vision, and saw many persons in a temple, and a lady at the entrance, with the sweet action of a mother, saying, "My son, why hast thou done thus toward us? Lo, sorrowing, thy father and I were seeking thee;" and when here she ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... Joseph appeared, with an expression at once haggard and ecstatic, his black hair and beard unkempt, his eyes glittering strangely in his flushed olive face, a curious poetic figure in his reddish-brown mantle ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and enthusiasm. The band immediately struck up "Conquest's joyful thunder waken..." All rose and cried "Hurrah!" Bagration also rose and shouted "Hurrah!" in exactly the same voice in which he had shouted it on the field at Schon Grabern. Young Rostov's ecstatic voice could be heard above the three hundred others. He nearly wept. "To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!" he roared, "Hurrah!" and emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to the floor. Many followed ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... days after she left him had been a season of ecstatic joy mingled with deep depression, as she alternately meditated upon the fact of a great love, ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... good lady who rarely misses a German opera confessed that sweet sounds acted upon her like opium. Neither scenery nor acting nor plot were of any importance. From the first notes of the overture to the end, she floated in an ecstatic dream, oblivious of time and place. When it was over she came back to herself faint with fatigue. Another professed lover of Wagner said that his greatest pleasure was in following the different “motives” as they recurred in the music. My faith ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... for it seemed to him that it absorbed into itself all the true poetry of his life as regarded the past, and gave him new aspirations and hopes as regarded the future. To Lycidas the remembrance of his poetical triumph in the Olympic arena, the plaudits which had then filled his soul with ecstatic delight, was little more than to a man is the recollection of the toys which amused his childhood. The Greek had been brought face to face with life's grand realities, and what had strongly excited his ambition once, appeared to him now as shadows ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... among the vast number of heads and horns lying and hanging everywhere around, the Strathaivron head was at last produced, Lionel was horribly shocked and disappointed. Was this, then, his trophy that he hoped to have hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Ecstatic as Ben was, he could see sense in this; but vacation came first and Geraldine was a belle at Keefeport that summer. Her beauty blossomed, and all the repressed vivacity of her nature came to the surface. Her room at Rockcrest commanded the ocean, and every night before she slept she knelt before ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... savages watched them die. Have you ever thought what it means? But of course you have, for like myself you are cursed with imagination. God in heaven! is it wonderful that it gets upon the nerves? especially when one cannot find what one is looking for, that vast treasure"—and his face became ecstatic—"that shall yet be yours and mine, and make us great ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... knew years ago. She has sent a very kind invitation for you to spend the New Year's week-end with them. Mr. Nairn is going to Quebec by to-night's train, and could take you with him and bring you back on Tuesday. I don't know whether I ought"—but at the sight of the ecstatic joy on Judith's face she did not finish her sentence. "Run along, dear, and pack the new frock. I don't need to ask you if you want to go. You have been a good child and I think you have had enough rest. Come first and be introduced to Mr. Nairn. It is ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... interesting, but it's mostly a poetic, or ecstatic, jumble of words," said Mr. Perry. "And right there is the secret of many a mystery. It's clothed in a maze of language. Remove the maze, and it ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... Foote replaced [81] it with a "Thank you, my lord; you know the company better than I." Jevon, a century earlier, was in the habit of taking great liberties with authors and audience. He made Settle half mad and the house ecstatic when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, to "fall on his sword," he placed it flat on the stage, and, falling over it, "died," according to the direction of the acting copy. Quaint enough, but certainly no instance of anybody's wit, is the account ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... cherry-trees white with blooms, the lilacs and roses perfuming the air; but never again was he to sit beneath the vine-clad arbor as he had sat in former years, listening to Nature's symphony rehearsed by singing birds; never again was he to see the coming of ecstatic life in bud and blossom. He must bid farewell forever to all the enchanting scenes, pull up by the roots, as it were, all cherished things. What should he take? What leave behind? There would be little room on shipboard for ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... her face to the window, her head half lifted to catch every sound, from the creaking of the sun-warped shingles above her head to the far-off moan of the rising wind in the pine trees. Sometimes she fell into a breathless, half-ecstatic trance, living over every moment of the stolen interview; feeling the fugitive's arm still around her, his kisses on her lips; hearing his whispered voice in her ears—the birth of her new life! This ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... struggled down among the crowd, seeing nothing, and conscious from the chorus of ecstatic exclamations that they ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... knew him in his laboratory, was one man; but Mark Ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of "union with God" and the future of the ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... Figaro's famous song in the Barber of Seville, with that crisply fluent vocalisation which is never heard from any other than an Italian throat, accompanying himself on the concertina, which he played with ecstatic throwings-up of his arms, and graceful twistings and turnings of his head, like a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire. "Figaro qua! Figaro la! Figaro su! Figaro giu!" sang the Count, jauntily tossing up the concertina at arm's length, and bowing to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... cathedral in the distance, dark blue lifted watchful in the sky, his heart leapt. It was the sign in heaven, it was the Spirit hovering like a dove, like an eagle over the earth. He turned his glowing, ecstatic face to her, his mouth opened with a strange, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... now to wave the paddle, battling for my breath, ecstatic, crazy with excitement, each second like a year to me. Very soon I could make out someone at the bows, leaning well over, looking my way. Something put it into my head that it was Sallitt, and I began an impassioned shouting. 'Hi! Sallitt! ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... wreath; Phoebus descends; I mount, and, undepress'd by cumb'rous clay, Through cloudy regions win my easy way; Rapt through poetic shadowy haunts I fly: The shrines all open to my dauntless eye, My spirit searches all the realms of light, And no Tartarean gulphs elude my sight. 20 But this ecstatic trance—this glorious storm Of inspiration—what will it perform? Spring claims the verse that with his influence glows, And shall be paid with what himself bestows. Thou, veil'd with op'ning foliage, lead'st the throng Of feather'd minstrels, Philomel! in ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... well-bred, while, in the distance, Cicely capered about madly, half in rapture that the desired meeting had taken place, half in rage that she could not with dignity annex herself to the group. For one short, ecstatic moment, she held her breath; then she vented her feelings by plunging headlong into the next wave and swimming off as fast as she could. Instead of making his bow and then beating the decorous retreat of an eccentric recluse, Mr. Gifford Barrett, the composer of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... steep and rocky path, where they had great difficulty in following her. They finally arrived at the grotto, and were astounded to observe the change that came over her. She seemed to be in a state of ecstatic awe. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... But the ecstatic dancer paused not nor rested in her incredible exertions; the excited girls alternately told their beads and then joined in the dance again, while the gray-haired mother, kneeling on the marble pediment of what might have been the fragment ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... moonbeams striking rays from the silver embroidered on her veil, and the anklets above her little feet, she seemed small and fragile, altogether desirable, and infinitely to be protected to the man beside her on the edge of the sand. Still more so when she waxed ecstatic with delight on the approach of two horses, one bay ridden by a man clothed from head to foot in white burnous, and a led mare as white as ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... bourgeois to the finger-tips. His character was a curious effervescing mixture of talent, learning, vanity, childish petulance, inquisitiveness, sagacity, ecstatic patriotism, and ambition. He was a splendid orator, with the voice of an old coster-woman; a savant with the presumption of a school-boy; a kind-hearted man, with the irritability of a monkey; a masterly administrator, with that irresistible tendency ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... words and took flight. Victurnien went soon afterwards, but not before others had guessed his ecstatic condition; his face wore the expression peculiar to happy men, something between an Inquisitor's calm discretion and the self-contained beatitude of a devotee, fresh from ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... deal, dear. I mean all that a man can mean. That is it. You hardly understand that I am serious to the extent of ecstatic joy on the one side, and utter indifference to the world on the other. I shall never give it up till I learn that you are to be married to some ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... fascinate the imagination. The consciousness of union with God produces an exquisite confidence in the wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing circumstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine atmosphere—the soul's native air—every energy is quickened. The divine realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man—who, temporarily inhabiting a physical body ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... known, the Cure's visits gave my aunt no such ecstatic pleasure as Francoise supposed, and the air of jubilation with which she felt bound to illuminate her face whenever she had to announce his arrival, did not altogether correspond to what was felt by her invalid. The Cure (an ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... be all illusory?—Could they?—Did I dream that your soul held willing intercourse with mine, beaming divine intelligence upon me? Was it all a vision when I thought I heard you pronounce the ecstatic sentence—You could love me if I would ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... disillusionment was none the less keen and sickening, and the pain was as that of a corporeal wound. It seemed strange and foreboding, when we entered the breakfast-room, not to find everybody cracking whips, jumping over chairs, and whooping. In ecstatic rehearsal of ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... to me is half so fair As Hyde-Park Corner, or St. James's Square; And Happiness has surely fix'd her seat In Palace Yard, Pall Mall, or Downing Street: Are hills, and dales, and valleys half so gay As bright St. James's on a levee day? What fierce ecstatic transports fire my soul, To hear the drivers swear, the coaches roll; The Courtier's compliment, the Ladies' clack, The satins rustle, and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Norah cried, giving her hammock an ecstatic swing. "We'll have to fly round, though. Did you ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... She raised her hands in a half-despairing gesture and into her eyes welled a flood of passion as if a dam had broken and made concealment futile. Her words came with a low thrill, and the man's brain swam with an ecstatic sense of discovery which for the moment obscured all ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... companion, although slow to notice such things, remarked it wonderingly; and with one accord we paused to listen to so rare a performer. It was not different in quality so much as in quantity. Such a flood of it! Such copiousness! Such long, trilling, accelerating preludes! Such sudden, ecstatic overtures would have intoxicated the dullest ear. He was really without a compeer,—a master artist. Twice afterward I was conscious of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... of cinnamon. I grated the nutmegs and pounded the cinnamon up, and then, with one hand full of each, I went on deck, and walked slowly up and down in front of the American tourists. Soon I heard an ecstatic cry, "My dear, I distinctly smelt spice then!" Another turn, and another jubilant exclamation: "It's quite true about the spicy breezes. I got a delicious whiff just then. Who would have thought that they would have carried so far out to sea?" A sceptical elderly gentleman was summoned from below, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... magnificent contempt for material truth is a lesson to all artists. We are reminded of William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley. He seems to regard the human-frame as so much soft clay, upon which he can trace his ecstatic hieroglyphs, in defiance both ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Old Person of Tring, Who embellished his nose with a ring; He gazed at the moon every evening in June, That ecstatic ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... Leichardt's town just then. Thus Mrs Gildea did not know whether or not he had read the flowery description telegraphed by a Melbourne correspondent who interviewed Sir Luke Tallant and his party at that city and wired an ecstatic paragraph about the beautiful Lady Bridget O'Hara who was accompanying her friend and distant relative, the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... not partial. It was therefore harmonious—in harmony with all his other qualities. He had power over diseases of the body, and also those of the soul. He knew what was in man, and what was in nature—in the present, and in the future. There was nothing ecstatic, enthusiastic, nothing of excitement, about him; but everything denoted a fulness, a ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... an out-of-the-way neighborhood in the vain hope that the chill of absence might hinder what home rule had only served to help. But one day Jonas on a hunting excursion made the acquaintance of some youth, who, among other chitchat, happened to break into ecstatic praise of the graces of a certain fair damsel who had recently come to live in a farm-house near their home. Of course the anvil missed Jonas for the next day, and the next, and the next, while he experienced the hospitalities of his new-found friends—and their neighbors. It ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... trucks with bricks, and their noses and their cheeks under their eyes were covered with red brick-dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all was Lipa singing in a high voice, with her eyes turned upwards to the sky, breaking into trills as though triumphant and ecstatic that at last the day was over and she could rest. In the crowd was her mother Praskovya, who was walking with a bundle in her arms and breathless ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... LOVE.—Mother! ecstatic sound so twined round our hearts that they must cease to throb ere we forget it; 'tis our first love; 'tis part of religion. Nature has set the mother upon such a pinnacle that our infant eyes and arms are first uplifted to it; we cling ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... unfortunate Fourier had at his side the Virgin Mary. The Saviour of men elbowed St. Labre. They were of plaster run into moulds, or roughly carved in wood, and were colored with paint as glaring as the red and blue of a barber's pole, and covered with vulgar gildings. Chins in the air, ecstatic eyes shining with varnish, horribly ugly and all new, they were drawn up in line like recruits at the roll-call, the mitred bishop, the martyr carrying his palm, St. Agnes embracing her lamb, St. Roch with his dog and shells, St. John the Baptist in his sheepskin, and, most ridiculous of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... metaphysical potencies whereof we know next to nothing), the seemingly miraculous powers exhibited, however weakly and childishly, in numberless seances, privileged to possess among the company an ecstatic medium between (as is assumed) ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... tragedy of Sarah Jacob, should ever a hysterical girl take it into head to do so; and there would not be wanting, even from among those who might read this history, individuals who would credit any monstrous declarations she might make. Even now in a little town in Belgium, an ecstatic girl is going through the same performance with extraordinary additions, and books are written by learned physicians and theologians, with the object of establishing the truth of her pretensions. ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... malice I had never experienced before, immediately after I had delivered the first blow. The more I killed the more excited I became. I urged myself to go on. I was so beside myself, so enflamed, so ecstatic that I smashed up, and destroyed everything before me. I cut about me on all sides. Most of all the "little ones" suffered at my hands—the young peas in the fat little pods, the tiny cucumbers that were just showing above ground. These excited me by their silence and their coldness. And I ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... the praise of Allah in a splendid voice which filled the horizon, Baia laid aside her guitar and with her eyes fixed on the Muezzin seemed to be rapt in prayer. For as long as the chant lasted she remained ecstatic, like an Arabic St. Theresa. Tartarin watched her and thought that it must be a beautiful and powerful religion which could give rise to such transports of faith. Tarascon hide your face, your Tartarin dreams of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... it is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied, and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms which, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... seen your Play, and, since then, I have not seen any other like it. "When will I come again?" To see it twice within a week would be too ecstatic a joy for a dweller—may I say a Liver—in London, who is more at home as one of the Lights of Asia. So, for the present—to paraphrase what I believe were the words of a popular poet whose name has passed from my memory—such, alas! is popularity—I will say to you, "Not to-day. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... early folly should reach you and dim the pride with which you regarded me. I wanted to feel myself yours so closely and so dearly that you would not mind if any one told you that I had once cared, or thought I had cared, for another. The week of our marriage came; I was mad with gaiety and ecstatic with hope. Nothing had occurred to mar my prospects. No letter from Denver—no memento from the Klondike, no word even from Wallace, who had gone north with his brother. Soon I should be called wife again, but by lips I loved, and to whose language my heart thrilled. The past, always vague, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... because he wore no long beard, dressed neatly and had good normal manners, and they despised his philosophy for very similar reasons. It was a school which took the existing world and tried to understand it instead of inventing some intense ecstatic doctrine which should transform it or ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... was taken in—he fancied that his wife must have received and opened their credentials—and shook hands with them with courteous cordiality. But Mrs. Scott, with all her overflowing good-nature, was a sharp observer; and she, before a minute had elapsed, interrupted the ecstatic compliments of the strangers, by reminding them that her husband would be glad to have the letters of the friends who had been so good as to write by them. It then turned out that there were no letters to be produced—and Scott, signifying that his hour for dinner approached, added, that as he supposed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... all, religious absorption, meditation, expansion, ecstasy, shadow, light, soaring—in a word, Catholic devotion and inspiration. The "Credo," as if built on a rock, should sound as steadfast as the dogma itself; a mystic and ecstatic joy should pervade the "Sanctus;" the "Agnus Dei" (as well as the "Miserere" in the "Gloria") should be accentuated, in a tender and deeply elegiac manner, by the most fervent sympathy with the Passion of Christ; and the "Dona nobis pacem," expressive of reconciliation ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... heard a voice—oh, how wonderful it was!—there was authority in it, soul in it: 'Peter, come follow me,' and he dropped the nets, and went out to life's sea to fish for men. Ah, yes, I think as Peter wrote these words he remembered his solemn vows of loyalty, his ecstatic joy on the Mount of Transfiguration, and then, alas! his awful sin when he deserted Jesus in that dark terrible morning of the great trial. Oh, those bitter hours! Peter could ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... remainder of the family find their way here in a year or two, via Germany, the public will be better prepared to give a fitting reception to such distinguished visitors, including their suite of divine bulls and holy monkeys, their lustrations of cow dung, ecstatic hook swingings, burning of widows, and drowning of children, and other Pantheistic Philosophies, from the banks of the Ganges. What an outrage of decency for such men to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... clear to us that you have a call, that I find it hard to realise that you yourself are uncertain. But the very fact that you have been 'counting the cost,' and that you have no ecstatic joy at the prospect before you, encourages me. I am glad you realise the difficulties beforehand. What you don't fully see is the strength upon which you will be able to draw. I often think of those lines ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... carried about with him "that fondness for books which many waters could not extinguish," and gathered up all that his power, his wealth, and his vigilance brought within his reach. In Paris he becomes quite ecstatic: "Oh blessed God of gods in Zion! what a rush of the glow of pleasure rejoiced our heart as often as we visited Paris—the Paradise of the world! There we longed to remain, where, on account of the greatness of our love, the days ever appeared ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... brass and refurnished with new curtains, the Adventurer slid down the railway again, floated out from the cradle and pointed her nose toward Penobscot Bay. In the middle of a bright Friday afternoon she dropped anchor alongside her companion craft, Phil doing wild and ecstatic things with the whistle and eliciting no response from the Follow Me. Steve and Phil donned proper shore-going togs and tumbled into the dingey. The Follow Me was totally deserted, which accounted for the fact that, while their noisy arrival had aroused ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... be doubly certain of the loveliness of this. And there never was a more beautiful bride. All brides are beautiful, more or less, but this one was more. Isaiah, who had been favored with a peep at the rehearsal on the previous evening, was found later on by Shadrach in the kitchen in a state of ecstatic incoherence. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... entranced and delighted the girl who entered the carriage, although with a serene and peaceful countenance, yet with a certain plaintive wistfulness in the shadows of her blue eyes, which betokened no exemption from the ordinary fate of mankind. But now! what unspeakable joy, what ecstatic delight seemed to infuse fresh life and vigour to the fragile, graceful form! For a few moments she crossed her hands on her bosom, and with closed eyes remained silent; then, starting up and pacing backwards and forwards in the limited space of a railway ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... changed; a glow of ecstatic beauty has suffused around her; the light of another land is shed on her couch. Recognition is read on ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... bade, by fame inspired, Its wild notes seek the ethereal plain, Till angels, by its music fired, Have, listening, caught the ecstatic strain, Have wonder'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... an expression of ecstatic happiness. Even the soldiers who guarded the cross were struck with wonder. Vivantius, accompanied by some of the Christian brethren, claimed the body, and buried it with the remains of the other martyrs in the crypt of St. John the Baptist, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... awakes in a world that is newly created, poetry awakes with him. In the face of the marvellous things that dazzle and intoxicate him, his first speech is a hymn simply. He is still so close to God that all his meditations are ecstatic, all his dreams are visions. His bosom swells, he sings as he breathes. His lyre has but three strings—God, the soul, creation; but this threefold mystery envelopes everything, this threefold idea embraces everything. The earth ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... we are in the presence of a consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism is nothing which is not the sheer ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... house the next night, passing the door twice before he turned in and rang the bell, in order that his voice might be calm and his demeanor unshaken. But the fact that Micky, waiting on the porch, knew him and broke into yelps of happiness and ecstatic wriggling ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... array of bright gauzes, the glittering buckles, the flowers and plumes displayed there. And what a chattering they kept up! What a stir and a hubbub they made! So many "Oh-h's" and "Ah-h's," so many "How lovely's," and other ecstatic exclamations, were mingled with their conversation as was quite bewildering. In time, however, I became accustomed to this and discovered it was simply a way ladies have of expressing their approval of things in general. Around the glass cases which held the trimmed hats the women buzzed like ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... but an intolerable nuisance to them to be swooped off to bed by a dingy old nurse just as the people are beginning to come, and shining silk, and floating lace, and odorous, faint flowers are taking their ecstatic young souls back into the golden days of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... interior life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, etc. Immanuel Kant was almost the only profound speculative thinker who was decidedly convivial, and given to gulosity, at least at his dinner. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the curtain of night falls on these ragged ones, scattered now, many of them, to varied homes of vice, and filth, and misery, the heavy eyelids close to open again, perchance, in ecstatic dreams of food, and fun and green fields, fresh air and sunshine, which impress them more or less with the idea embodied in the aphorism, that "God made the country, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... been so much tried, and has had such a life, that he may well be called a real hero in a quiet way. Yes, I well may like him! And I am sure he likes me!' said another whisper of the heart, which, veiled as was the lady in the mirror, made Phoebe put both hands over her face, in a shamefaced ecstatic consciousness. 'Nay—I was the first lady he had seen, the only person to speak to. No, no; I know it was not that—I feel it was not! Why, otherwise, did he seem so sorry I was not poor? Oh! how nice it would be if I were! We could work for each other in his ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself than at any other period of his short life. If the house in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, which I believe has been lately identified with absolute certainty, could have been purchased,—the house where, on the verge of disaster and doom, Keats spent a brief ecstatic interval of life,—there would have been some meaning in that; but one might almost as well purchase the inn at Dumfries where Keats once spent a few nights as the house at Rome; in fact, if the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hackneyed admonition to Chip to keep out of jail if he could. There must have been something very wistful in their faces, for the Little Doctor smiled bravely down upon then from the buggy seat, and lifted up the Kid for a four-toothed smile and an ecstatic "Bye!" accompanied by a vigorous flopping of hands, which ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower |
